Business use vehicles are indispensable to the performance of business activities, and one to several tens, or several hundreds, of vehicles are owned by companies, in accordance with their relative sizes. In large companies, specified departments may be responsible for the managing of all company vehicles, but in many companies, users are individually entrusted with the managing of the vehicles they operate. However, since most of users possess no technical vehicular knowledge, and since they do not own the vehicles they operate, there is a trend for the maintenance of vehicles to be neglected and the vehicles to be handled carelessly. If vehicles continue to be used in this manner, the vehicles will suffer frequent breakdowns and their service lives shortened, and as a result, maintenance costs will be increased.
On the other hand, for a company that owns and operates a plurality of vehicles for business activities has, as one problem, the fact that maintenance management costs and the operating period for each vehicle are not easily obtained, and therefore, an appropriate number of vehicles required for an operation can not be precisely defined. Especially when individual vehicle maintenance is not performed properly, as described above, an appropriate number of vehicles becomes more and more difficult to determine, and actually, there are many cases wherein more vehicles are owned than are required.
Therefore, in patent document 1 below, a vehicle managing system is proposed according to which a car dealer or a car maintenance workshop performs the centralized management of information related to the vehicles of clients, and for which a web site or email is employed to transmit to a client information such as vehicle maintenance periods. According to this system, the users of vehicles can obtain proper maintenance periods, and thus, use of the business efficiency for the car dealer or the workshop can be improved. Furthermore, in patent document 2, below, a system is proposed, mainly for application for taxis, that is used to collect and manage business performance information for individual vehicles.
Patent Document 1 Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-230423
Patent Document 2 Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-167585
However, although the invention in patent document 1 improves the convenience for vehicle management, it does not contribute, for example, to a reduction in management costs and calculations performed to determine an appropriate number of vehicles. Furthermore, the invention in patent document 2 merely collects information obtained for individual vehicles, and does not perform any specific analysis based on the obtained information.